1. Field of the Invention
The field of the invention is data processing, or, more specifically, methods, systems, and products for tunneling IPv6 packets.
2. Description of Related Art
The Internet Protocol, version 6 (‘IPv6’), is a version of Internet Protocol (IP) designed to be an evolutionary step from the widely used version, Internet Protocol, version 4 (‘IPv4’). IPv6 provides increased address space, a simplified header format, support for authentication and privacy, autoconfiguration of address assignments, and new quality-of-service capabilities.
Despite the growing use of IPv6, IPv4 is still the dominant protocol of the Internet and therefore transition mechanisms have been provided to use the IPv4 routing infrastructure to send IPv6 packets. ‘Tunneling’ allows an IPv6 compatible host or router to transmit IPv6 packets across existing IPv4 networks. Tunneling an IPv6 packet across an IPv4 network is typically carried out by encapsulating the IPv6 packet in an IPv4 packet and sending the packet to an IPv4 compatible router. Encapsulating an IPv6 packet in an IPv4 packet is carried out by adding an IPv4 header to the packet making the packet transmittable across an IPv4 network. Conventional techniques for tunneling IPv6 packets across IPv4 networks typically require a particular IPv6 compatible origin router to be manually configured with an IPv4 destination address of another IPv6 compatible router that receives the encapsulated packet. Manually configuring routers with such destination IPv4 addresses is time consuming and cumbersome for system administrators. Such manual configuration also makes routing encapsulated packets inflexible, because only a limited number of such the destination addresses are manually configured onto an IPv6 compatible router. There is therefore an ongoing need for improved methods, systems, and products for tunneling IPv6 packets.